Summit of the Future

“Humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough.” Three years ago, sounding a dramatic wake-up call to jolt United Nations members into action, UN Secretary-General António Guterres offered up an extensive set of recommendations on how to tackle the most pressing challenges faced by the world. One of his proposals was a Summit of the Future, which will now take place on 22 and 23 September during the seventy-ninth session of the UN General Assembly. “Multilateral solutions for a better tomorrow” is the guiding theme of the summit, which will be concluded by the adoption of a Pact for the Future.

Together with Namibia, Germany is playing a key coordinating role: the two countries are jointly managing preparations for the summit and facilitating negotiations. Germany is keen to secure positive results, seeing that it is preparing to head the UN General Assembly next year and will be reapplying for a non-permanent seat at the Security Council in 2026. In preparation for these roles, a successful summit would come in handy.

The UN in Crisis

With the world in a state of turmoil, it is time for the international community — and the UN at its centre — to break the mould. But as international crises and conflicts mount, the United Nations seem less and less capable of securing ambitious compromises. In the rare instances such agreements are secured, they are beset by failure once they reach the stage of implementation, as the fate of the once-celebrated Paris Climate Agreement illustrates.

The Sustainable Development Goals, which all states pledged to implement by 2030, are facing a similar fate. The reality is sobering: the international community has a mere six years left to meet the goals enshrined in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Currently, countries are only on track to implement a fifth of the agenda’s targets. With half of the targets, progress is minimal or moderate, while the status of roughly a third of the UN targets is stagnant or even worsening. In other words, our efforts to usher in an era of sustainable development are set to end in dramatic failure. The wealthy countries in the Global North are ignoring their financial pledges, which only exacerbates poverty and hunger.

The UN can only win back trust by giving itself and its organizational structures a twenty-first-century upgrade.

What we need is a United Nations that is willing to take ambitious action — especially in response to the growing number of wars and conflicts. After all, it was a commitment to peace and solidarity that drove the creation of this global organization almost 80 years ago. Today, Russia’s war against Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza in particular, along with armed conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere, are challenging the international order. The policy of mutual blockage pursued by the Security Council’s permanent members (the US, China, Russia, France, and the UK) has created a United Nations that appears drained of both authority and agency.

As a result, trust in the UN has declined to an all-time low. The organization is underfunded and in need of structural overhaul, and true multilateralism based on member states’ inclusion through equal participation remains elusive. What is more, countries from the Global South in particular are criticizing double standards (vis-à-vis the UN’s obligations towards human rights and international law) and withheld funding.

The truth is: the UN can only win back trust by giving itself and its organizational structures a twenty-first-century upgrade. This will require fundamental reform.

Division over UN Security Council Reform and Financing for Development

This process is set to start in September in New York at the Summit of the Future. In 2023, member states already agreed to make sustainable development and financing for development, peace and security, science and technology, youth and future generations, as well as the transformation of global governance the focus of this summit.

The Pact for the Future will be negotiated and adopted by member states on the basis of consensus, meaning that in the end every member state will have to approve every single word in the document, which amounts to a process of intense negotiations in which compromises will need to be formulated. Naturally, such a process makes it tremendously difficult to push for the necessary, sweeping reform of the UN. It would be so much easier to endorse the status quo.

In January 2024, early on in the negotiation stage, the co-facilitators from Germany and Namibia circulated a 20-page draft of the pact. Member states responded by submitting a flood of suggested changes and amendments, inflating the text to a 200-page document.

On the positive side, the current draft includes initiatives to explore taxing the super-rich and a UN tax convention. It remains to be seen how much of this spirit will animate the final document.

A second draft was released this May, followed by further revisions after recent negotiations in July and August. The preamble now underscores the need for ambitious responses, yet Barbara Adams of the Global Policy Forum and other critics continue to insist that the actions set down in the respective sections fall short of what is needed.

Until the summit in September, the focus will be on settling the key points of contention and fine-tuning the text. One of the most disputed issues concerns the reform of the UN Security Council. Here, efforts are focused on increasing the number of permanent seats in the council in order to ensure all world regions are represented. Currently, neither the world’s most populous country nor the African continent or Latin America have representation. Initial reform proposals have now been circulated, but it will take further rounds of negotiating to reach an agreement on the ultimate allocation of seats. Further-reaching initiatives seeking to reform permanent members’ veto powers are likely to find no floor for debate.

Even if Security Council reform is likely to be high on the agenda, it will not be the only topic shaping the summit’s outcome. Financing for development and reform of the international financial architecture are two other issues considered paramount. Much of the summit’s success will therefore depend on how strong the push for reform is, for instance regarding financial pledges for developing countries or institutional amendments such as changes in voting power at the International Monetary Fund. Will the decisive discussions take place at the United Nations, giving all member states a say, or will they be confined to exclusive groups such as the G7 or the G20, thus excluding most UN member states?

On the positive side, the current draft includes initiatives to explore taxing the super-rich and a UN tax convention. It remains to be seen how much of this spirit will animate the final document.

The Future of Multilateralism

The Pact for the Future may not be binding, but as an officially negotiated document, it will set the parameters that will define the form and scope of future global governance processes. As such, it can also be used as a launching pad for institutional reform.

Irrespective of whether delegates arrive at a compromise on reforms of the Security Council and the international financial architecture, one of the key issues at stake is whether member states will step up and endorse multilateralism along with all the responsibilities it entails, or whether they will opt for a “multilateralism à la carte”.

The still-dominant Western powers have realized that many countries of the South are no longer willing to condemn breaches of the UN Charter committed by non-Western states as long as the West itself refuses to be held accountable for its own transgressions (the “Coalition of the Willing” in the Iraq War would be a case in point). Whether this realization actually increases their willingness to accommodate Southern countries’ interests will be crucial for the summit’s outcome.

Advances in knowledge, science, technology, and innovation could deliver a breakthrough to a better and more sustainable future for all. The choice is ours.

The fundamental dilemma is obvious: while there is widespread consensus regarding the diagnosis — global collaboration has failed — opinions on how to reshape global governance and tackle global inequality and threats are broadly divergent.

Experience teaches us that the summit will only prove a success if the final document is precise and binding enough to allow implementation — and monitoring of future progress. In the best of cases, the final documents negotiated in New York — and in particular the Pact for the Future — will be able to serve as a roadmap. If the aim is to launch a far-reaching upgrade of the multilateral system, the summit will have to be backed up by specific measures in the first two years following its adoption.

The state of our planet requires us to take bold action. Understandably, expectations are high on what the Summit of the Future should deliver. But these expectations need to be tempered by realism. Much would be achieved if the United Nations succeeded in organizing a forum at which all states are able to find to a consensus. Especially in light of the worldwide resurgence of nationalism, this would enable the UN to rebuild trust in multilateralism, which is an indispensable ingredient for solving the challenges faced by the international community.

To quote from the current draft of the pact: “If we do not change course, we risk tipping into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown … Yet this is also a moment of hope and opportunity. … Advances in knowledge, science, technology, and innovation could deliver a breakthrough to a better and more sustainable future for all. The choice is ours.”

Those are words well chosen. Let us hope they are backed up by actions.

This article first appeared in nd.Aktuell in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Translated by Lyam Bittar and Anna Dinwoodie for Gegensatz Translation Collective.